


The One Where Three Fugitives Visit a Tourist Destination

by fascinationex



Series: transformers fics by fascinationex [50]
Category: Transformers - All Media Types
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Implied Sexual Content, M/M, canon typical decepticon behaviour, continuity puree, vague nods to frame dysphoria, young decepticon command
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-01-22
Updated: 2021-01-22
Packaged: 2021-03-14 01:07:30
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,142
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28912830
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/fascinationex/pseuds/fascinationex
Summary: Mescante is a minute dwarf planet, silvery grey and swirly and beautiful from orbit. From the view port, Starscream can't help but imagine clear, cold skies and a crisp, thin atmosphere. The imagined feeling of it is enough to make his wings twitch.It feels like it's been a millennium since he was let out of the ship. He's driving himself mad, and he knows Megatron is hanging onto his temper by a single, fragile thread. (Soundwave is a cypher. He always is.)
Relationships: Megatron/Starscream (Transformers)
Series: transformers fics by fascinationex [50]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1311599
Comments: 12
Kudos: 49





	The One Where Three Fugitives Visit a Tourist Destination

Mescante is a minute dwarf planet, silvery grey and swirly and beautiful from orbit. From the view port, Starscream can't help but imagine clear, cold skies and a crisp, thin atmosphere. The imagined feeling of it is enough to make his wings twitch.

It feels like it's been a millennium since he was let out of the ship. He's driving himself mad, and he knows Megatron is hanging onto his temper by a single, fragile thread. (Soundwave is a cypher. He always is.)

It's a very long way from Cybertron. This is the farthest Starscream has ever been from home—although that doesn't signify much, because it's the first time he's ever left Cybertron. Anywhere out here is the farthest he's been from home, stark and strange and alien...

Does he miss Cybertron? That's... complicated. He's not thinking about it too much.

They get landing clearance at the single spaceport, as expected.

And then Starscream gets out at last and discovers that they're stopping all the mechanicals at the disembarkment check point.

At first Starscream thinks it’s just an effort to document what weaponry people are bringing onto the planet: on organic-controlled planets, the organics always get away with their ‘natural’ venoms and foul corrosive secretions, but mechanical species seem always required to register even their native weapons systems.

Cybertronians, of course, have subspace pockets, all twisted up inside the secret spaces their bodies, so even if their on board weaponry has to be registered, the locals still have to rely on a certain amount of honesty—which, obviously, they can’t. Starscream is annoyed, but he really isn’t inconvenienced by it.

But he's heard that Mescante is supposed to be hospitable to mechanical life (even Cybertronian life), so he’s surprised—which is, in the end, what alerts them all.

Starscream is the first to disembark because he's getting restless in a way that Soundwave and Megatron never seem to, wings twitchy and plating shuffling in the recycled atmosphere of their shuttle. The moment they get clearance to land, he wants to be in the air again, so powerfully it’s less a desire and more an imperative.

Even the air of an organic planet is better than being stuck in the shuttle for anther second.

But when Starscream gets off the shuttle, disembarking first into the equally stale air of the shuttle-port, he sees that they’re checking mechanicals. There are long lines through the check points—it’s any sovereign world’s right to ensure nothing contraband is being brought in, or so the theory goes, so that’s common. But the organics—all shapes and sizes, really—are moving a lot faster than the mechanicals.

His optics narrow with a soft whirr that only he can hear. Even the air of the shuttle-port feels good on his wings. He wants to transform and take off and it’s an enormous effort even to think this information through, to follow the chain all the way through his sub-processors. All his instincts want him not to give a damn.

“They’re looking for someone,” he comms Soundwave.

There’s a split-second pause.

“Me? —Us?” Megatron asks, suspicious. Of course Soundwve has looped him in.

Starscream isn’t _exactly_ sick of him—he’s not sick of his big hands, or his wet mouth, that’s certain (although Soundwave, surely, must be sick of what they do together with them). He’s sick of his ego, for sure. But... Megatron and Starscream don’t even fundamentally disagree on a lot of issues that come up day-to-day.

With their people imprisoned or deactivated or scattered to the winds, there's a terrible absence of friction. Without the aggravation of trying to run the entire Decepticon movement, they’ve been practically _getting along_.

But Starscream is sick of being exposed, constantly, to Megatron: to his unreliable tempers, his arrogance, his brooding and his sharp edges, his certainty that he’s always right (when, in fact, _Starscream_ is always right, and Megatron is only right when they agree, but of course Megatron is too stubborn to know this)…

He could have done without Megatron being looped into _every_ communication, is all.

Soundwave doesn't seem to get sick of Megatron. It's impossible to say why.

Starscream hisses a breath of air out through his vents.

It’s possible that the Mescanti are looking for them specifically. Their latest _minor setback_ has involved fleeing the entire planet of Cybertron with what remains of their faction, and the Senate takes a dim view of Cybertronians running amock outside their control.

They wouldn’t have contacted Mescante specifically. It's too small and too far and too gross and organic. But they might have contacted the people who contacted them.

“I don’t know," is what Starscream says, restless and unwilling to think it further through. "Obviously."

“Find out,” Megatron says, flat and implacable.

Starscream’s wings twitch. “How am I to know, unless I go through?”

After all, they might be looking for him, too. 

“Starscream,” Megatron says in his best _why must you test me like this_ voice, which, yes, is one of the reasons Starscream is becoming weary of constant close quarters with him. “You look like every seeker ever pulled off an assembly line. _Lie to them._ ”

It’s a fortunate thing that Megatron isn’t out here to actually see how Starscream flinches at that.

His wings tremble on his back, all tension. He rolls them, gently, but it's too late and he's already uncomfortably aware once more of how little their plating feels like his. He knows from experience that there's no polish, no paint job, that will make it better. 

His wings jerk sharply.

“ _Fine_ ,” he hisses, irritable.

“And now he’s annoyed,” he hears Megatron saying, muffled and presumably to Soundwave. Soundwave, predictably, doesn’t answer—at least not so Starscream can hear him, anyway. Who knows what he may say about him in private.

Starscream flexes his plating, cracking the seams and closing them sharply, and queues impatiently. His restless fidgeting helps nothing, of course.

The corridor is broad but there are a surprising number of visitors coming through—not, it must be said, Cybertronian ones, but various other species are well represented in all of their squishy and damp "glory". The shuttle-port looks so much like so many others—off-white walls, grey floors, multilingual signs, bright overhead lighting that is subtly uncomfortable for his optics—that he has started wondering if there’s one company that just goes around building them all to the same specs, making a killing at every new planet...

The organics manning the place are only the size of a minibot, but that’s plenty big enough for Starscream to see their eight multifaceted eyes and long hairy fingers in more detail than he particularly wants to. They are are armed with acid rifles and electro-knives, and their long delicate nails shed venom like a cybersnake’s fangs.

“Cybertronian?” his checkpoint officer asks. The voice sounds… meaty. Wet. 

Starscream pulls a face, but he imagines his expressions are as incomprehensible to Mescanti as theirs are to Starscream. “Yes.”

“Designation?”

“Thundercracker.” He rattles off his ID code, too, long memorised just as well as his own. If Thundercracker ever gets out of prison (unlikely) there’s not going to be a planet in the galaxy that won’t mistake them… but that sounds like Thundercracker’s problem, doesn’t it.

Cybertron is notoriously private, so Starscream isn’t surprised when the code works just fine on whatever little tablet it is the organic punches it into: the Senate do not provide data about citizens’ movements to outside authorities. They don’t even note who’s dead, most of the time.

“Have you—” there is a buzz, and whatever translator the organic is using cuts out for a second. Then it recovers. “—this person?”

It _is_ an image of Megatron. A rather unflattering one, actually, taken of him in a poorly lit oilhouse, before he even changed his alt mode. 

It is still recognisable.

It’s the nose, Starscream thinks cynically. There’s something very familiar about Megatron's twice-broken nose.

“No,” says Starscream.

The next questions are less obviously to do with Megatron: Where has he come from? What is his purpose here?

He avoids any mention of the places they might have been seen, and tells the organic that his crew has made the stop only so he can stretch his wings and buy fuel. It sounds like that will be the truth, anyway—Megatron won't be getting out of the shuttle.

The officer nods and hums and eventually stamps his chest plates with an oily paint that indicates his visitor status—he hopes—and tells him to have a good stop over.

He avoids swiping his fingers through the paint, but it’s a near thing. It feels vile.

Starscream launches himself into the air the moment he steps foot outside, transforming and hurtling straight up and into the skies. The whole planet smells horrible and unfamiliar, and the chemical composition of the air is all wrong, but movement and momentum settle vital systems in ways that nothing else will.

“They’ve got an old holocap of you,” he sends to Megatron when he’s in the air. Beneath him is a bank of orange-grey clouds. Above, stars, wheeling and glimmering like diamonds high above. “It’s an accurate one. We’d be better off retreating and finding somewhere where we’re unknown.”

Starscream banks and turns, and then does a joyous loop in mid-air, spinning happily. It’s _wonderful_.

There’s a pause and a click, and then Megatron says, “And their arms?”

“The organics?” Starscream frowns. “Acid pellets and native venom. Their electroknives are no danger to armour like yours or Soundwave’s.”

They might hurt Starscream—he’s lighter-armoured, of course. He needs to be, so he's able to get into the air and stay there. But they’d need to _catch_ him first. Other seekers can't even catch him. Organics? Unlikely. 

Megatron hums thoughtfully.

“No,” he says, then, and Starscream slows his breakneck speed through the atmosphere. “I don’t think so. Soundwave’s data indicates there’s barely a million of them.”

“A million is still a lot of organics to _personally_ kill,” Starscream complains, but he considers the implications.

The planet has a shuttle-port entirely for tourism; the Mescanti aren’t actually using their air space for anything themselves. Beneath his wings, cultivated fields and low-density cities seem to be the order of the day. There are herds of strange lumbering organics and winding dirt roads throughout.

Starscream is one of two creatures in the air of their planetoid right now—the other is an equally Cybertronian helicopter, who he thinks will be easy enough to kill (or perhaps even convince, once he's seen the kind of violence Megatron is capable of)—and Starscream has enough firepower in his subspace to take out a few hundred thousand of the natives without even returning to the shuttle for weaponry.

“We don’t need to worry about resistance,” Megatron says in his audial receptors.

To Starscream his close, rumbling voice is as compelling in the temptations of conquest as it is in those of the berth. Starscream's body hums to hear it, low and mechanical, sweet white noises. Megatron cannot hear it over the comms but it has its meaning: _I'm listening_.

Megatron's still talking: “—or about collateral. There’s nothing _important_ here to concern ourselves with, just organic dross…”

“What would we do with it?” Starscream wonders aloud. They both know it won't take much for him to be convinced.

...but he likes when Megatron makes the effort to convince him. Sometimes he's rough, dangerous, but he always wants Starscream acting on his side. The reassurance soothes things in buried Starscream's deepest subsystems, ones he didn't think anyone but him knew about.

“Do you think I am suggesting we stop to conquer a useless organic world for no reason?” Megatron asks now, mild as anything, which means he’s probably about to lose his temper.

Starscream hesitates before answering, and in that pause Megatron laughs, and Soundwave sends him a map of the local area. The city he’s flying above is a yellow light, and the rises and falls of the topography are shades of grey.

Several small areas beneath him are lit up a bright bloody pink.

Ah. They've discovered _energon_ here.

That changes things.

Starscream doesn’t know the first thing about digging energon out of the ground—but _Megatron_ does. Some days Starscream forgets, usually when he’s all fiery polemic and fierce warrior rhetoric, but Megatron does, in fact, know a _great deal_ about mining for energon.

“Ah,” he says. He lets the sound hang there for a second, soft and raspy over the comms. “I see exactly what you mean. We may as well make this little stop over _useful_.”

He banks again, turning back towards the shuttle port. Megatron and Soundwave probably won't need air support, really—they are each deadly combatants and accomplished killers—but he wouldn't want to disappoint them. 

**Author's Note:**

> A reject from megastarmas, but I looked at it today and figured it might entertain someone anyway. I like to imagine Mescante as the new Decepticon HQ, with their scattered followers showing up in ones and twos.  
> anyway, feel free to let me know if there was something you liked and have a good night!


End file.
